It's Not a Pretty Sight Page 20

  Making his second attempt to drive out to Mickey’s in less than two hours, Gunner would have spent the entire trip trying to guess what else, other than the bracelet, Serrano could have been looking for among Nina’s possessions, had he not been busy trying to shake the recurring feeling that he was missing something. A word or an object, something seen or heard over the last two days that his conscious mind should have latched on to, but didn’t. He thought if he retraced his steps, did a mental review of where he’d been and who he’d talked to since early Tuesday, he might come up with something, but nothing ever clicked. It was maddening. More so now than it had been the night before, when the feeling had last come over him, because now he had to believe it was genuine, that it wasn’t just a trick his mind was trying to play on him.

  Still, he pulled the Cobra up in front of his landlord’s barbershop as confused by the feeling as ever.

  He came through the door to find Mickey having a red-letter day. Four customers waiting, one being served. A red-haired brother Gunner knew only as Appleton was sitting in Mickey’s chair, head bowed down as the boss man himself put the clippers to the back of his neck; everyone else in the shop was a stranger to Gunner.

  Mickey said, “You’ve got company.” Tilting his head sideways toward the rear of the shop.

  Gunner stopped walking, wondering if it was already too late to turn around. “Five-oh?” he asked, using the common vernacular for the police.

  Mickey shook his head. “A civilian. Said his name is Stanhouse. Gary Stanhouse. I told him you weren’t here and I didn’t know when you’d be in, but …” He shrugged. “Man said he wanted to wait. Only been back there about five minutes.”

  Gunner looked at his watch: It was nine minutes after twelve. Right around lunchtime at Bowers, Bain and Lyle.

  Stanhouse was sitting on the couch when Gunner came in, fingering the pages of a magazine he’d brought in from the waiting area out front. Gunner didn’t notice what it was. Wearing a form-fitting, lightly pin-striped double-breasted suit in a tasteful, earth-tone brown, the attorney stood up upon Gunner’s arrival and said, “I hope you don’t mind that I waited in here. The barber outside said—”

  “It’s okay,” Gunner told him, before taking a seat behind his desk. “What’s going on?”

  Stanhouse walked over to the other chair in the room but didn’t sit down in it, said, “I thought I’d save us both some trouble by coming to see you, before you could come looking for me again.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “I’m an attorney. It was easy.” He wasn’t bragging, just stating a fact. Gunner thought he looked nervous, but not upset. Like he’d come here more to negotiate than to dictate terms.

  “I hadn’t seen the last of you yesterday. Had I?” he asked.

  Gunner shrugged and smiled. “That’s hard to say.”

  “No, it isn’t. You made it very clear that I was somebody you intended to keep an eye on in your ridiculous search for Nina’s murderer. And I can’t have that, Mr. Gunner. I cannot function with that kind of thing hanging over my head. Do you understand?”

  Gunner didn’t say anything.

  “So I came here today to try to reason with you. I want you to believe me when I tell you I had nothing to do with Nina’s murder. I want to be able to leave here today knowing our paths will never cross again.”

  “I can’t promise you that, Mr. Stanhouse.”

  “I’m not asking you to promise me anything. I’m just asking you to hear me out. You can do that much, can’t you?”

  Gunner fell silent again, thinking it over. “All right. You want to talk to me? Talk to me,” he said finally. “But start with where you were two Tuesday nights ago. From six in the evening to about two A.M., specifically.”

  “The night Nina died.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I was at home. Working on a brief.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t leave your home at all that night?”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Anybody see you there? Like a pizza deliveryman maybe, or somebody trying to collect for the paper? Anybody like that?”

  “No.” Stanhouse shook his head.

  “That’s too bad,” Gunner said.

  “You mean because I don’t have an alibi.”

  “One would have come in handy, don’t you think? You wanted to convince me of your innocence?”

  “I should have lied to you. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying I haven’t heard a damn thing yet that would lead me to believe you’re being honest with me, Mr. Stanhouse. And you’ve been talking for fifteen minutes.”

  “What do you want me to say? That Nina got a raw deal at the firm? Okay. She did. You’re right, all the charges we made against her were false. I made them up in retaliation for the charges she made against me.”

  “Even though they were true.”

  “No!”

  “You weren’t harassing her at work?”

  “I wasn’t harassing her, no. I was … strongly attracted to her, yes. I admit that. And I made the mistake of admitting it to her, on several occasions. But did I ever harass her? No. Never. I was never rude or impolite to Nina in any way.”

  “And yet she went to your superiors to try to get you fired.”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you explain that? If she wasn’t being harassed—”

  “She overreacted. That’s all. We could have worked out our differences alone, given time, but she wouldn’t wait. She was too impatient to get away.”

  “To get away from you.”

  “Yes.” When Gunner just stared at him, Stanhouse said, “She wouldn’t give me a chance to prove myself. To show her that I meant her no harm. She thought I wanted her. That I was looking to get her in bed, and nothing more.”

  “But of course you weren’t.”

  “No. It was never like that with Nina. My feelings for her went much deeper than that.”

  “You were in love with her.”

  “From the day I first laid eyes on her. Only I could never get her to believe it.”

  “It isn’t possible she believed it fine, she just wasn’t interested?” Gunner asked.

  “No. That’s not possible.”

  “Why not? You think every time a man falls for a woman, the feeling has to be mutual?”

  “We’re not talking about what happens every time. We’re talking about what happened with us. Nina and me.”

  “There was no Nina and you, Stanhouse. There was only you. And I think that’s the problem you found yourself with right there.”

  “I don’t have a problem.”

  “You don’t think so? You harass a woman by day, and stalk her by night, my brother, you’ve got a problem. Ask any shrink in the business.”

  “I never ‘stalked’ anybody,” Stanhouse said angrily.

  “Call it what you will. You were following Nina home when you weren’t calling her there on the phone, that’s stalking. In anybody’s book. Whether you did it for love, or not.”

  “I told you. It wasn’t like that.”

  “You never followed her home at night?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But what?”

  “But I wasn’t stalking her. I was protecting her. Making sure she was okay. She was going home to a psychopath, Gunner. Her life was in danger every minute she spent with that sonofabitch. So … I checked in on her a couple of times, yes. And I called her, yes. But only because I was afraid for her, and I wanted to be there if that coward she was married to started in on her again.”

  “It all sounds very noble, Stanhouse, but—”

  “But what? It’s the truth. I swear it!”

  “Look, I’d like to believe you, man, but why would I do that? Because you’ve got a sincere face?”

  “You want proof? Read her diary. No matter what she told everyone else, she wouldn’t write lies in her diary. No woman
ever does.”

  Gunner sat up in his chair. “Her diary?”

  “Yes. She kept a diary. You didn’t know that?”

  Gunner didn’t answer the question, because he never heard it. His mind was suddenly spinning, formulating thought faster than he could assimilate it.

  “Who told you she kept a diary? Nina?”

  “She didn’t have to tell me. I saw it. She used to write in it during her breaks sometimes.”

  “What did it look like? Describe it for me.”

  Stanhouse told him it was a small, paperback-sized book bound in red cloth. Something one could buy in any drugstore or stationery shop.

  Gunner asked him if he’d ever had an opportunity to read any part of it.

  “No. Of course not,” Stanhouse said. As if it should have been obvious to Gunner that he was above committing such a grievous breach of etiquette.

  “Then how do you know what was in it? You never read it, what makes you think it would prove your version of things, and not hers?”

  “I told you. Because nobody writes lies in their diary. What the hell’s the point of keeping one otherwise?”

  It was an arguable point, but just barely. Some people mixed fact with fiction in their personal diaries, but not many. A diary was generally reserved for the truth, existing as it did as the one place its author could feel comfortable relating it.

  If Nina had been keeping one, Gunner had to find it. And not just because it might tell him whether or not Stanhouse was being straight with him now.

  He knew exactly where to start looking.

  fifteen

  HE FOUND A NOTE ON THE COBRA’S WINDSHIELD WHEN HE went to leave. He had an idea what it would say even before he took a look at it:

  I can see you, motherfucka!

  He scanned the street, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. If Dartmouth was still around, he was hiding; it wouldn’t be hard. Gunner stood there in the street for a long minute, to see if the man cared to finish their business right here, right now, but Dartmouth never made a move. He was probably gone.

  Gunner tossed the balled-up note to the curb and got in the car.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mimi Hillman said. But her eyes had already told him that she did.

  “Momma, I need to see it. If you have it, you’ve got to give it to me.”

  “I don’t have it. I’m sorry.”

  She was moving back and forth across her kitchen floor, cooking, but being evasive didn’t help her any; she was lying to him, and Gunner knew it. She simply didn’t lie often enough to be any good at it.

  “I don’t believe you,” the investigator said.

  Mimi ignored him, acting as if the tomato she was slicing on a breadboard had her complete attention.

  “You knew about Nina and Shirley Causwell. That’s why you told me not to believe everything I heard about her. You were adamant about that.”

  “Aaron, I don’t have time for this.”

  “I didn’t know what you were talking about at the time, but then I found out about Gary Stanhouse, and what it was that really cost Nina her job at Bowers, Bain and Lyle. I figured you were warning me about him, in case he tried to tell me what he’d been telling everyone else, that she had been in love with him, and not the other way around. But you weren’t, were you? It wasn’t Stanhouse you were warning me about at all.”

  “I’m not listening to this. I’m not!”

  “Nina would have never told you about it herself. She would have known how you’d react, what you’d think it meant. So you had to have found out about it some other way. Either by hearing it from someone else—or reading about it somewhere. In her diary, Momma Hillman. You read it in her diary.”

  “No!” She threw the knife in her hand into the sink and turned to face him, furious.

  “If the police have it, you can’t help me. Or if it’s in her house with the rest of her things, same thing. I’ll never see it in time to do anything with it. But if you have it—”

  “What do you want to see it for? Because you think it’s true? Is that what you think?”

  “Momma …”

  “She was making it up! The things she wrote about in that book—not a word of it really happened. Not one word! My baby wouldn’t do anything like that. She wouldn’t!”

  She was shaking, standing there in front of him with both fists clenched like the secret she was trying to defend was the difference between life and death. He could debate the veracity of the diary’s contents with her for the next twenty-four hours, he wanted to do that, and it wasn’t going to change her mind. He recognized that immediately.

  So he let it go. She could believe what she wanted to believe, as long as he got to see the book. Ten minutes later, he did.

  He read it while sitting in the Cobra, in the empty, shadeless parking lot of Athens Park, on Broadway and El Segundo.

  Mimi had removed it from Nina’s home the day they found her body, before the police could seal the place up and maybe come across it themselves. She’d discovered its existence a month or so earlier, the night Nina had come to visit and carelessly left her purse open on her mother’s kitchen table. Mimi hadn’t meant to be nosy, but the book had piqued her curiosity; she’d never known her daughter to keep a diary before. So she’d opened it and started reading, intending to put it down after a page or two. She ended up reading fifteen or twenty, she wasn’t sure anymore how many, then closed the book forever.

  Horrified.

  It had been her misfortune to stumble upon the pages that related to Nina’s one-night stand with Shirley Causwell, an episode that could only have had the disastrous effect it did upon a devout Catholic of Mimi’s stature. Her initial reaction had been shock, but regret had soon followed. She knew something now that could only make her miserable, something she could never ask Nina to clarify or explain away. All she could do was feign ignorance, and hope she could put the memory out of her mind before her daughter could see the effort it took to hold her silence.

  Had Mimi read the diary in its entirety, as Gunner did, she would have learned that she had seen its most provocative passages. The rest of it was fairly mundane, just short, uninspired reflections of Nina’s life as an abused woman. Heartbreaking stuff, all of it, but nothing particularly memorable or noteworthy—with one possible exception.

  The entry in question would have meant little to Mimi had she come upon it, but Gunner was not so shortsighted. He recognized the import of the entry immediately. It may not have been the reason someone feared Nina enough to murder her, but it had that potential.

  And it answered one question, at least, that Gunner had been getting nowhere trying to answer on his own.

  “Tell me about Alvin Bascomb,” Gunner said.

  He hadn’t given Trini Serrano any time to gear up for his visit, hadn’t called ahead to say he was coming, or bothered to say hello when he came through the door; he’d just shown up at her Hollywood studio for the second day in a row and dropped Bascomb’s name like a greeting, watching her face for fireworks. He didn’t get fireworks, but he did get recognition, and the minute she realized she’d shown him that much, she knew the jig was up. Telling her he’d read Nina’s diary had almost been unnecessary.

  Still, she didn’t say a word about Bascomb until she’d asked some questions of her own. More to satisfy her own curiosity than to stall for time.

  “Where did you find it?” she asked.

  “At her mother’s,” Gunner said. He could have told her it didn’t matter where he found it, just to keep Mimi Hillman out of the picture, but he thought it might help her to be straight with him if he demonstrated a willingness to be straight with her first.

  “Do you have it now?”

  “No,” he lied. Being straight with her was not synonymous with telling her everything.

  “Then—”

  “Don’t worry about where it is. It’s somewhere safe, that’s all you need to know.”

  Serrano nodde
d her head, conceding the point.

  “Tell me about Bascomb,” Gunner said again.

  “Tell me first what Nina wrote about him.”

  “I think you already know that.”

  “I know what I told her about him. I know that. But how much of what I said she actually wrote in her diary …” She shrugged. “I can only guess about that.”

  “I’ll put it to you like this; The salient points are in there,” Gunner said. “What’s missing are the details.”

  “And the salient points are?”

  “A dead man, a wife who confessed to killing him, and a shutterbug friend of the wife who actually did. Do I need to go on?”

  Serrano’s face fell, all hope that Gunner had been bluffing suddenly gone.

  “I didn’t think so,” Gunner said.

  “All right. So the skeleton in my closet has finally seen the light of day. What happens now, Mr. Gunner?”

  “I just told you. Now I want the details.”

  “The details? What for? So you can have even more dirt to blackmail me with?”

  “Who said I wanted to blackmail you?”

  “You didn’t have to tell me. Not being as stupid as I look, I figured that out all by myself.”

  “Well, you figured wrong. I’m no blackmailer. But I am the man holding Nina’s diary, and I’ll be more than happy to turn it over to the police if you don’t stop hemming and hawing and start talking to me. Right now.”

  “But I still don’t understand—”

  “I’ll give you two minutes, Ms. Serrano. Take it or leave it.”

  She took it, but not before all of the allotted 120 seconds had come and gone.

  “Alvin Bascomb was a terrible man,” she said. “One of the most sadistic people I’ve ever known. He was big, and he was ugly—about six seven or six eight, at least three hundred pounds. He was a bear. And he towered over Doreen, his wife, like a skyscraper over a toolshed—she was just as tiny as he was huge.

  “Anyway, I met Doreen one night I was doing a ride-along with the police out in Culver City, taking pictures and talking to the victims whenever a domestic disturbance call came in. Bascomb had beat her up pretty bad and she’d called the police on him. I’ll never forget her face that night. She had this giant gash over her left eye that wouldn’t stop bleeding, and when they asked her how she’d gotten it, she told them her husband had hit her over the head with a stereo speaker. Can you believe that? They found it sitting on the living room couch, the wires still hooked up to it, and everything.”